Website conversions and traffic are most important to marketers, so they need to be able to use their content dynamically. For example, a schedule can be created for the automated publishing of various content using the eZ Platform Enterprise Edition. You can also customize this workflow in a few easy steps at any time.

We would like to tell you more about how you can increase your editorial productivity and reduce IT costs. Our portfolio also offers solutions in the areas of personalization, cloud hosting and e-commerce. In this previous blog post, we covered the whole overview with benefits for you.

Take the chance and meet us personally. Meet us and our partners comwrap, DIA and rocket-media on 12th and 13th September at dmexco, Cologne.

Hall 7.1 Stand D-060

Our partners will support you in the project implementation and together we will find your individual solution for your business success.Some customers who already trust eZ:

eZ Platform as the Content Management Platform (CMS)

Learn more about the eZ Platform as an Open Source Edition and the premium version eZ Platform Enterprise Edition. You will learn how our partners comwrap, DIA and rocket-media use these solutions successfully for their customers so that they can offer a harmonious and conversion-optimized user experience at any time and across all devices. You will find us in Hall 7.1, Stand D-060 from September 12-13.

eZ Commerce - Improve your customer journey: From the first interest to the final order

eZ Commerce seamlessly adds e-commerce capabilities to eZ Platform, providing a more content-driven e-commerce solution for B2B and B2C businesses. This all-in-one platform features an easy to use interface for your content team that supports all the monetary and transactional aspects of an e-commerce website. And from your buyer’s perspective, they are continuously engaged with relevant content for wherever they may be in their journey with you.

Manage all your ecommerce and content management needs in a single system.

News

Participate in the eZ Community Survey

Participate in the eZ Community Survey and by doing so, contribute to the eZ Community Strategy 2018-2020. The Survey will only take 5 minutes of your time. Your feedback is used to help us build a strong strategy for community activities, to further improve the ecosystem you are part of. Thank you!

Symfony security advisories

Symfony has published two security advisories which also affects the version eZ Platform runs on. Keep that in mind, in case you spot (new) unexpected problems. Do report them on Slack or our Forum, or even better on jira.ez.no when you are able to pinpoint the problem to these patches.

There is one known issue, see https://jira.ez.no/browse/EZP-29492. The Symfony update removes support for two old headers, if you depend on them you may have to change your code.

eZ Platform v2.2.2 released

Today, eZ has released eZ Platform v2.2.2. This release brings Symfony from 3.4.11 to 3.4.14. It also includes many improvements and bug fixes. Check the changelog on GitHub for the full details.

Meetup, London UK?

A few weeks ago a few community members suggested a local Meetup, location London UK.

As it is, André Rømcke will be speaking at Symfony Live UK on September 28. What about a Meetup on the 27th, with or without PHP London? Any ideas or feedback? People interested to join a Meetup? Leave a reply on our Forum.

Win a ticket to SymfonyLive Berlin

Do you want to be part of the most important Symfony event in the DACH region, one of the most important and popular PHP developer conferences in Germany and beyond.

eZ Systems is giving away a ticket for the SymfonyLive Conference Day Berlin on October 26, 2018. Complete the form, and with a little luck you get to travel to Berlin. Conditions for participation can be found here, the raffle giveaway runs until September 25, 2018. (Be aware that SymfonyLive Berlin is for a good part of it a German speaking event, some talks and workshop being in English others in German)

Become a certified Editor

The French office has organised a free training for Editors on October 18, 2018 in Paris. Do you use eZ Publish or eZ Platform in your daily life or plan to do it? So this day is for you.

Not only will you be able to discover the new features of the back office, increase the skills to facilitate your daily life, you will also meet our experts and share questions and knowledge with them. You will get a certificate proving your skills at the end of the day. Join us in a friendly setting, on the rooftops of Paris, in the 9th arrondissement of the capital. If you are interested, check out more information including a form to sign up.

In Other News:

Resources

Share your blog on ezplatform.com

We love content at eZ. If you want to share yours, for instance a technical write-up of how you realized a project on eZ Platform, we welcome you to share this with us. We can publish you blog on ezplatform.com and also mention it in the ‘Week in Review’. E-mail us with any content ideas you have.

News

Event News

eZ Systems will be at DMEXCO September 12-13, 2018 in Cologne, Germany. Joining us, are our partners comwrap, DIA die.interaktiven and rocket-media.

“Anyone who knows us or follows our activities knows that we have always been present at this TOP event in the industry in the last years. 2018 is a year of change and growth. We want to use this opportunity and friendly invite you to our booth which is more than twice as big as last years!”

Netgen announced this week that the Web Summer Camp eZ Track was complete. You find more information on the Web Summer Camp website. For the 7th time around, Netgen will host experienced eZ experts with topics on the newest developments in the field. This includes speaker from Netgen, Contextual Code and eZ Systems.

CFP SymfonyLive Berlin

The call for papers is open for SymfonyLive Berlin. If you‘d like to present technical stuff around eZ Platform, Symfony or any adjacent technology , submit your talk before July 31, 2018.

Symfony 4 compatibility

eZ’s Product team has put Symfony 4.x compatibility on the roadmap targeting end of year possibly in sync with 3.0. But it has started taking feedback in the form of an Epic on our Issue tracker, with a few identified issues already. If you are developing on eZ Platform, and you spot compatibility issues, do let us know, and register an issue on our tracker.

In Other News:

Resources

Releases and documentation

Did you know that our Fast Track releases are supported for 5-6 months now (since eZ Platform 2.0), and that our release schedule changed to a 4 month release cycle (instead of 3), To better support this for our developers, the documentation team will keep documentation of these releases available longer on https://doc.ezplatform.com.

Question of the Week

A current question in our Community is the support for workflows in eZ Platform. The most recent discussion can be found on our forum. Have you developed a workflow in eZ Platform already? Consider sharing your solution and reply in that forum thread.

Note from the Product team: `Flex workflow` (basic send for review and approval feature) is already available on eZ Platform for all enterprise customers. We plan `Advanced workflow`,a more complex editorial workflow allowing administrators to create a workflow with multiple steps and users responsible for every steps. So far, this feature is targeted for 2.4. We are currently on the specification phase. `Advanced workflow` will also be available for enterprise customers but some components might end up in the open source version.

Why you should visit us - your benefit

Together with our partners comwrap, DIA die.interaktiven snd rocket-media, we are not only present as a "CMS provider with implementation partners", but we are more interested in meeting your specific needs and show you which success you can achieve with our CMS marketing solution with segmentation, the personalization solution eZ Personalization and eZ Commerce, so that you can maximize your future business potential.

Goals eZ pursues

If we are new to you, we would like to provide you a short overview about eZ Systems -which is a global content management platform provider founded in 1999 in Norway. With more than 18 years of commercial open source experience, we support more than 500 business clients in over 25 countries. Our ecosystem consists of more than 80 business partners and a community of more than 45,000 members. We also have more than nine offices in North America, Europe and Asia.

Our vision is to help companies maximize the value of their digital content and deliver digital experiences that foster growth.Our software eZ Platform supports developers, editors and marketers to create content-rich websites and apps - from corporate presences, e-commerce and native apps to intranets, web portals and the Internet of Things (IoT). eZ also offers additional personalization, cloud hosting and e-commerce services through its innovative content management solution to meet the needs of your business. Find out more about our products here.

The expertise and the added value

Every company has its strengths and special focus. As specialists in their field, our partners can respond specifically to your business needs. Therefore you do not only get to know the product, but also the provider and supplier eZ Systems. Also, you can talk to one of our partners about the project implementation - a true support that is also available to you during the project.

Partner Overview

comwrap designs the digitization of B2C, B2B and D2C business models with a determined focus on the needs of users and customers. Their focus is companies in the Finance and Fintech, Pharma & Healthcare, Industry and Publishing sectors. The company currently employs 65 people and offers holistic strategic consulting, creative conception, design and development, technical implementation as well as the marketing of sophisticated digital projects and the optimization of digital platforms.

Some customers, who put their trust in comwrap:

Today’s world is digital. For brands and companies to be successful as well as sustainable, a new kind of management consulting is needed – and a new kind of agency. People at DIA, are extremely motivated and enthusiastic planners, graphic artists, copywriters, web developers and -designers, solution architects, administrators, brand managers, marketing specialists and they accompany their customers along their journey into a successful digital future.

rocket-media GmbH & Co KG develops future-proof and scalable web and software solutions for its customers in medium-sized businesses and industry. This creates the basis for highly efficient, digital business processes and successful online communication. Their portfolio include the realization of international corporate websites and e-commerce platforms, the integration of Product Information Management systems as well as the conception and implementation of mobile applications and customized individual developments. Targeted online marketing or SEO concepts complete the package.

The success of all projects stands and falls with the acceptance of the users. Therefore, they always pay attention to a consistent user-centered conception and design. Complex IT projects, reliably controlled to the target: that's rocket-media.

Some customers, who put their trust in rocket-media:

Do you need support in your online projects, are you about to relaunch your website or your strategy needs an optimization or even new option?Then use the meeting point of the global digital economy as your personal meeting point with us and our partners - we will gladly advise and help you with the implementation.

News

eZ Platform 2.2.1 available

eZ Platform 2.2.1 has been made available. This release includes several bug fixes for our most recent Fast Track Release, eZ Platform v2.2. You can view the changelog on GitHub.

Facilitating the migration path to eZ Platform

In conjunction with the release of eZ Platform 2.2.1, we released ezplatform-xmltext-fieldtype 1.6.0. This package notably contains the XmlText to RichText converter for migrating to eZ Platform's RichText format.

This release includes several improvements, further facilitating and improving the migration path to eZ Platform. Full details are available on GitHub.

Discover eZ Platform v2.2

Learn more about eZ Platform v2.2, our summer release in a recording of the Webinar accompanying this release. This release includes both major and small improvements. Recently documented is one of these small improvements, setting the pagination limit in Admin UI.

Local Meetups

There is an interest by the Community to organize an eZ Meetup in London (UK). If you are interested in this, do leave a messages in the Slack thread.

If you want to help organize, or just attend. If you have ideas, or think we should link up with existing Symfony or PHP Meetups in the area, we would love to hear from you.

Winner of the eZ Connector May Competition

“We wish that all could win! However, like the World Cup, only one can be left to raise the eZ Connector trophy. The winner of the eZ connector May competition is the Mailchimp connector. MailChimp is an email marketing solution that allows you to build customizable email campaigns as well as automate your email marketing initiatives. Emmanuel, who is working as a senior consultant at our partner Smile, developed the connector on his personal time (and name).”

Read the full announcement on our Blog. This announcement also includes a demo video and news about two more connectors.

We wish that all could win! However, like the World Cup, only one can be left to raise the eZ Connector trophy. The winner of the eZ connector May competition is with the Mailchimp connector. MailChimp is an email marketing solution that allows you to build customizable email campaigns as well as automate your email marketing initiatives. Emmanuel, who is working as a senior consultant at our partner Smile, developed the connector on his personal time (and name). As the winner of the competition, Emmanuel will receive $2,500 and an additional $5,000 prize if he is able to build an additional connector in the “Build with eZ” phase.

The MailChimp connector provides a range of cool features that seamlessly integrate eZ Platform with MailChimp. A few notable features are:

Subscription list: Create mailing lists from the eZ platform interface that are automatically defined in the MailChimp account and linked to the eZ Platform application.

Campaigns: Create a marketing campaign linking content from your eZ Platform content repository to be shared in your campaign. Similar to the mailing lists, the campaigns are automatically defined in the MailChimp account and linked to eZ Platform.

Subscription form: Create a specific form for a campaign on a page generated by eZ Platform.

Click here to view a demo of the connector and to learn more about its capabilities.

In addition to the MailChimp connector, we had two other connectors that are a great addition to eZ Platform:

Creemedia created a Contentbird connector. Contentbird is a content marketing platform where you can create optimized content for your website.

The connector lets you sync the content from Contentbird to eZ Platform and vice versa. For example, choose which of your eZ Platform user is the author of the article, which type of content should be created and in which category the content should be placed. The package is open source and available on Github: https://github.com/creemedia/eZcontentbirdBundle.

Watch the video below to learn more about the eZ Contentbird Connector capabilities:

Another connector in the running was inwebco’s Google Analytics (GA) connector. The connector lets editors and administrators of eZ Platform access the web analytics from GA directly within eZ Platform user interface. The connector adds a new tab on the administrator interface and makes it possible to view further information from Google Analytics without having to access the Google Analytics application.

As a reminder, the eZ Connector Marketplace expansion program was launched this past February at eZ’s Barcelona partner meeting. The eZ Connector initiative consists of two programs: eZ ConnectorCompetition and Build with eZ. These programs are an opportunity for partners, developers, and third-party software vendors to build connectors that extend eZ Platform’s capabilities.

The next competition will kick off on July 1st. Registration for next month’s competition is already open.

Copyrights and intellectual property requirements: The connectors must be open source and follow the GPL license (version 2). For the eZ Connector Competition phase, participants are welcome to host the codebase of the connector anywhere, be it on their personal Github repository or their company Gitlab account. We, however, ask that they grant eZ Systems with the right to use the connector following the eZ Contribution License Agreement (CLA) , During the Build with eZ phase, the participant must agree on the same CLA, and, as it will be a collaboration with eZ Systems, we ask the codebase of the connector be hosted on eZ Systems GitHub organization (https://github.com/ezsystems/). eZ Systems will create a dedicated repository for it when launching the phase. To learn more visit our Build a Connector for eZ page.

News

eZ Platform 2.2.0 available

The summer release of eZ Platform v2.2 has arrived! This release introduces features such as page builder, bookmarks, roles and permissions and much more that benefits editors, website administrators and developers. Read the full announcement on our blog.

eZ Platform v2.2 is available on ezplatform.com and via composer update. eZ Platform Enterprise Edition v2.2 is available for customers in their support portal. eZ platform Enterprise Edition v2.2 is available as a trial for partners in the partner portal. It is of course also available on eZ Platform Cloud. To see the full list of our new features, check out our release notes as well as the link to the list of changes on Github for open source and enterprise edition.

Join us on July 3rd (Webinar), 2018 at 10:00am ET/ 3:00pm CET as Product Marketing Manager, Amit takes us on a tour of eZ Platform v2.2.

eZ Platform internationalization

With the introduction of the localization feature in eZ Platform 2.2, you can now contribute to an existing translation or create an entirely new translation, if need be. If you’d like to take part in this effort, consider signing up with Crowdin, a simple service that offers a very helpful in-context translation interface. Feel free to contribute to our efforts here: https://crowdin.com/project/ezplatform. You can find documentation on ezplatform.com and GitHub.

Big thanks to all contributors. The 2.2.0 i18n packages have been deployed. We have 10 languages above 50%:

French & Polish (100%)

Norwegian Bokmal (89%)

Spanish (71%)

German (65%)

Portuguese (63%)

Greek (60%)

Hungarian (60%)

English US (58%)

Italian (51%)

Russian (38%)

More translations are of course available, you can check them on the Crowdin project.

Note on Symfony 3.4.12

We have received a few messages where a Composer update brings your Symfony install to 3.4.12, causing small problems. One example results in an infinite login loop. You can read about that on Slack. The Symfony 3.4.12 version has been added to the ‘conflict’ section of ‘package.json’ for eZ Platform.

In Other News:

Resources

New Bundles

Emmanuel Drouet share another bundle through his ‘One Monday One Bundle’ effort, the eZ Platform UI Tree content browse menu bundle. This bundle is available on Packagist, you can watch a demo on YouTube.

Gaetano Giunta shared the Abacus Advance Bundle by Kaliop. This bundle is also available on Packagist.

Question of the Week

Carlos Revillo: Do we have something similar in eZ Platform v2 to "RemoveSiteAccessIfDefault" which was available in Legacy? Edi Modrić provided a working example which you can check on our Slack Workspace.

With the release of eZ Platform v2.2, we’re continuing our efforts to make eZ Platform simple and easy to use for editors. When we created features such as the page builder, bookmarks and copy subtree, we specifically had marketers and editors on our minds.

What’s in for editors?

Faster, better and friendlier Page Builder

The first major feature of eZ Platform v2.2 is the new and revamped Page Builder, available solely for Enterprise Edition customers. The Page Builder is replacing the previous module Landing Page Manager.

The Page Builder has been completely rebuilt on the new architecture introduced with eZ Platform version 2. This new architecture is a big win for editors, because it’s enabled the Page Builder to be way faster than the previous Landing Page Manager, making the page building experience faster and more enjoyable.

The Page Builder is also much more elegant and comfortable to use thanks to the new design relying on the UI guidelines introduced with version 2. It’s also more powerful, allowing for advanced operations such as switching layout on an existing page and using different page content types with different fields. Editors can now easily switch from the page view to the field view, whether they are in View mode or Edit mode, to view or edit fields.

We look forward to hearing the user feedback on the new Page Builder feature.

Quick access to your favorite content with Bookmarks

Bookmarks is another feature that will simplify work for editors. Bookmarks allow editors to save different content items (articles, images, video, etc.) both from the main content view in the repository and from the Universal Discovery Widget (UDW). Editors can then access these bookmarks from multiple places, including the main dashboard, user menu and UDW.

Editors can now simply bookmark a specific content item, which might otherwise be tedious to find in the content tree, and quickly access it again without needing to browse the entire content repository. This will save time and make it more pleasant to work with large collections of content.

Bookmarks will also allow editors to streamline their work and assemble a list of future tasks to work on. Bookmarks are personal, so each user has the ability to manage, create or delete their own unique list of bookmarks. To learn more about bookmarks, check out the blog post “Bookmarks Feature Overview.”

Localized versions of the administrative interface

Another big improvement with eZ Platform v2.2 is that the administrative user interface, is now localized into several different languages. And it’s simple to add new localization, too, if need be.

Editors can now use the language they want to use eZ Platform with. All they would need to do is configure their browser, which in many cases will be automatic. The default language for the interface is English, but the interface for v2.2 has been shipped with several translations, including French, German, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, and Russian. More languages can be added, hassle free, thanks to the contributions of our community.

More editorial experience improvements and good surprises

Some additional improvements with eZ Platform v2.2 may initially seem small, but actually provide a great amount of benefit to users. One example is the enhanced search filter capabilities that we first introduced in v2.1. For eZ Platform v2.2, we’ve decided to add a new filter so that users can search for content via content creators.

Here’s a quick preview of the improved search filter capability:

Another small, yet much needed improvement relates to the trash. Users are now able to permanently delete single content items without having to purge everything in the trash.

What’s in for administrators?

Along with editors, website administrators will also be happy to hear that eZ Platform v2.2 has a number of features that will both save time and improve their day-to-day lives.

Simply knowing what users can and cannot do

Understanding which permissions are assigned to users can be quite complex and time consuming. To simplify this process, we’ve included two new tabs in the user and user group views called Policies and Roles. These tabs allow administrators to easily view the policies and roles assigned to a given user or user group.

Using permissions in the Admin Panel more effectively

Previously, although permissions were applied to the system, the admin panel user interface was not adapted accordingly. This meant that users with limited permissions could try to access features they weren’t permitted to use and get error messages in response. Now, if a certain user does not have the permission to access a certain function (i.e. access admin panel, create content type, etc.) then they will simply not see that particular feature. This simple change makes the permission system much more powerful and effective.

Saving more time by setting limitations for policy

When adding or creating a new policy, the administrator will now have the ability to define a limitation. Depending upon the policy, a limitation can be anything from content type, order, to location of the subtree. This new capability will reduce the time and resources required to maintain a certain policy.

Improved content type management interface

One interesting improvement relates to the content type management interface. The content type view functionality is now more user friendly and provides direct access to edit the content type. We’ve also added a sticky toolbar on the edit interface of the content types. This toolbar will make it simpler and faster to add field definitions to content types, eliminating repetitive scrolls up and down. The content edit has also been improved by letting the user fold or unfold the different field definitions.

What’s in for developers?

Another priority for the release of eZ Platform v2.2 was to continue improving the developer experience. This has been taken into account with all features of the release, starting with the new Page Builder.

First of all, the new Page Builder lets developers create custom blocks for their pages in a much simpler way. For that, they only need PHP and Symfony skills—no need for advanced JavaScript knowledge anymore. All that’s needed to create custom blocks is Twig templates, YAML configuration files and, optionally, some PHP code into controllers.

Another major update for developers is they can now use the page field type in any content type, giving them much more flexibility in how to build websites using different sets of fields for different pages, e.g. to manage metadata or specific business logic.

Customizing the design of your Page Builder blocks with ease and flexibility

All blocks have a redesigned configuration interface, but more importantly, there are two new fields to give some control over styling to the editor. They can now customize the CSS class to be used or even the CSS code. And this is all done in a safe way, as it only applies to the block. These two new class and style fields are for advanced editors only, so we allow administrators to decide in a configuration file if they should be enabled or not.

Customize admin UI with the design

engine Previously, we introduced a design engine in eZ Platform for the development of websites. Now we’ve decided to use the same design engine for the admin interface itself. The design engine provides developers with a simple way to override any template, graphic asset or CSS styles of the admin interface.

For example, developers can now easily customize the look and feel of the admin interface’s top menu. This is just one of many examples, and developers can customize any part of the interface, whether it be a menu or just change an action bar.

URL pattern definition

Based on developer feedback, we introduced a way to define/customize the URL pattern used by the websites. This provides flexibility to customize the type of URLs for each site. By default, eZ Platform will now use lowercase URL with dash separators, as that was requested by most users and customers. While the direct impact on SEO is still to be demonstrated, this updated URL pattern definition will still save time and stay in line with the mainstream. For existing eZ users upgrading to v2.2, there will be the ability to configure the URL pattern to what was used prior to the upgrade, resulting in a transparent migration that doesn’t imply any SEO struggles.

Using image placeholders for local dev environments

One of the last features we want to highlight will definitely improve the developer experience. Developers can now use image placeholders on their local installations. This feature is useful when working on large projects where it’s challenging to have all the images and files present in production environment on the development environment. By saving time and resources (not having to synchronize every files), this feature is a great way for developers to preview their work without using the production image data.

A few more worthy mentions

There are few more features that are worth mentioning that can be extremely beneficial for developers. First of all, bookmarks are also accessible and manageable through the REST API. Also, moving forward we will be using Symfony 3.4.12 for v2.2, keeping us up-to date with Symfony’s path.

When it comes to the localization feature introduced above, developers can contribute to an existing translation or create an entirely new translation, if need be. If you’d like to take part in this effort, consider signing up with Crowdin, a simple service that offers a very helpful in-context translation interface. Feel free to contribute to our efforts here: https://crowdin.com/project/ezplatform

Last but not least, we’re very excited to finally share our new UI guidelines as a new part of our documentation. The UI guidelines reflects the components, features and patterns that underpin eZ Platform user interfaces and will help all developers better customize and extend eZ Platform user interface. In these guidelines, you will have access to recommendations for styles, color usage, icons and typography. To learn more about UI guidelines, read the blogpost “Why you might need UI guidelines” or the following documentation.

eZ Platform v2.2 is available on ezplatform.com and via composer update. eZ Platform Enterprise Edition v2.2 is available for customers in their support portal. eZ platform Enterprise Edition v2.2 is available as a trial for partners in the partner portal. It is of course also available on eZ Platform Cloud. To see the full list of our new features, check out our release notes as well as the link to the list of changes on Github for open source and enterprise edition.

Why did we decide to create this feature?

Bookmarks is not a new feature for eZ. In fact, if you all recall, bookmarks was present in eZ Publish. We knew back then that this was a popular and useful feature for our clients. Unfortunately, this feature was missing both in eZ Platform v1 and v2 because we needed to focus on improving our software architecture and user interface. We also needed to prioritize the most used features and decided to migrate the missing features as we progressed. We are excited now to reintroduce the bookmarks feature.

Bookmarks Capabilities

Bookmarks is a simple yet very useful and powerful feature. It is a feature that is guaranteed to improve the editorial experience. It's important to note that bookmarks are personal. This means that the bookmarks are directly related to an editor’s personal account. Editors can easily manage their bookmarks directly from the administrator interface. This feature will speed up the editors work by providing them a shortcut to their content items they are working on. This is extremely beneficial as it will reduce the amount of processes that need to be undertaken to publish your content. For example, a publishing company can publish anywhere from 100-200 content items a day. Rather than constantly browse their content repository they can simply bookmark all the content items they are working on and then edit and publish them once they are ready.

Another major benefit is that editors can streamline their work and see what they are working on in front of them. For example, imagine your editors are working on a blogpost and have assets in different folders and locations. Your editors can now bookmark all these different assets and have them organized and on display on the administrator interface.

Additionally, bookmarks can also be accessed through the universal discovery widget. If editors want to embed in the rich text editors, they can go to bookmarks and select and embed a content item or image.

We have no doubt that this feature will allow your editorial teams to be more efficient and save time as they deal with multiple content items. There will be many more exciting features in the upcoming release that we look forward to unveiling next Friday. In the meantime, if you are interested or have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below, on discuss.ezplatform.com or productmanagement@ez.no.

We have looked at how we can support our customers better. We identified that we need to work more closely with our partners and customers to understand and learn their needs and requirements. Based on that we have decided to introduce a dedicated Customer Success team (CS) at eZ . In short, the CS team will work closely with our customers to actively collect feedback that we can use to further improve our products and services. This also helps us to better understand our customers business, strategy, vision and end goals. Consequently, this will put us in a much better position to help our customers get the most out of their investment in our products and services.

What will this mean for you as a customer?

Enterprise customers will have a set number of meetings:

There will be a clearly defined number of meetings with each of our customers depending on the subscription level. For our larger customers we will have core meetings that focus on the following three categories; business, editorial and technical.

Not only a vendor

We will listen to you and collect information that allows us to provide more value to you as a customer. Our goal is together with the implementation partner to better understand why you have chosen eZ and how we can offer better return of investment to you. This means we want to be more of a trusted advisor and see how your needs can be met by our software.

Customer driven roadmap

It is important for us to be able to identify if there are common features that many of our customers ask for. The CS team works closely with product management to ensure that your voice is heard. We will collect these feature requests and when it makes sense push to have these features added to our platform.

Honest feedback is welcome

During our meetings we want to understand what we are doing right, but even more importantly we want to hear your honest opinion on the product. If you are not happy, we will not be!, it's that plain and simple.

Improved dialog

We will have regular touchpoints with you where the overall goal is twofold. We will make sure to understand your needs and plans for working with our platform and at the same time make sure you also know what our platform has in store for you. This means you should in the same way as our partner have a clear understanding of the direction of our products and be familiar with functionality we introduce in the coming releases.

As mentioned, projects on eZ are implemented by our great partners who are well versed in seeing where eZ is a great fit for the customers. With the Customer Success initiative, we do not only focus on the end customers, but also on improving how we work with our partners. We truly recognize that the customer will get the best experience from our software if the partner and eZ think collectively about how the products can be made more attractive in all ways.

How will you as a partner benefit from these changes?

Actively supporting you in your projects

We will make sure to follow your projects more carefully. Make no mistake, you will implement the projects, but we want to offer you our best practices. Customer Success will also make sure you can get the support you expect by involving the right people at eZ. Because you have real experience from driving implementation projects we are eager to learn how you can become more efficient in solving your tasks with our products.

Working together with our customers

Our mutual customers today deal with projects that most often do not have an end date. The idea is to have you continuously work with our customers and pair their business needs with new functionality of the platform. We believe this will be a great combination for all three. As all our implementation partners know it is of course much easier and risk reducing to keep a digital solution evolving through many smaller implementation tasks then having to start with new big bang projects every time. If eZ can show customers the core functionality of the platform, we want to see you take advantage of this to solve challenges the customers may have.

Meetings together with the customer

We will invite you to participate in meetings with our mutual customers. This is key to be able to show how we work together with the focus of making projects powered by eZ software a success for the customer.

I hope you now have a better understanding and see how the customer will receive more attention from us. As Director Customer Success at eZ, I am truly excited to learn even more about how our platform is used to meet the requirements of organizations today. Looking forward to the next chapter.

Developer Training Day

The first day, June 6, was a full day of training for developers in both basic and advanced levels. And in the afternoon the by-invitation only Product Innovation Board met to discuss the future of editorial experiences on eZ Platform.

eZ Conference Day 1

June 7 kicked off eZ Conference. In the morning we held a Partner meeting and lunch, where eZ partners heard about the latest developments in partner relations.

Aleksander Farstad, eZ’s CEO and Co-Founder initiated the conference in the afternoon with a keynote around digital transformation and the role of content. He invited Roland Benedetti, head of product to share the latest product news and roadmap. The highlights were a status update on project v2, which is currently in alpha and includes the revamp of eZ Platform UI that will provide lightning fast editorial experience and much needed customization and extensibility capabilities based on the Symfony framework which will reach version 3. Roland also announced the launch of eZ Platform Cloud, an integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering of eZ Platform built together with eZ’s partner Platform.sh. Following Aleksander and Roland’s talk were simultaneous Business and Technical Track sessions. The highlights of the day were two packed sessions in the Technical Track that gave an introduction to the forthcoming eZ Platform v2. Damien Pobel, eZ’s Lead Engineer for User Interface talked about eZ Platform UI 2.x, and a joint presentation from André Rømcke, eZ’s VP Engineering and Bertrand Dunogier, eZ’s Lead Engineer for eZ Platform revealed what developers can expect next for eZ Platform 2.x and Symfony 3.

Day one was also where the big festivities happened. After speaking sessions ended, everyone gathered outside by the Tower of London for a barbecue. The London weather was as expected—rainy and windy, but it didn’t stop us from enjoying the start of a great evening. Once back inside, we kicked off the eZ Awards ceremony lasting until 2am with a live band and open bar. eZ crew announced and welcomed winners on stage to hand them their eZ trophies.

eZ Conference Day 2

June 8 was a full day of Business and Technical Track sessions, including morning keynotes from digital customer experience expert, Gerry McGovern in his memorable presentation “Building a Customer-centric Organization” and an afternoon keynote from Richard Jones, technical director at Inviqa about “Content in 7 Dimensions.”

eZ Dev Bar

New this year: throughout days one and two we had the eZ Dev Bar—a section in the main conference area where developers could hang out, sit on blow-up chairs and play with eZ Platform v2. An eZ engineer or eZ Platform expert was always around to answer questions or give demos.

Hackathon

The more tenacious developers within the eZ community kept the pace high and joined forces in our hackathon on Friday morning, hosted by and at the Inviqa office. This was the first edition of a hackathon at the eZ Conference and was a soft test. It was very positive though it gathered a smaller share of developers attending the conference. Congrats to Sebastien Morel and Frank Dege who made good progress with their work on respective projects eZ Launchpad and Silver Shop.

Announcements: eZ London Office & eZ Platform Cloud

eZ Conference was also an opportune time to announce a new eZ office to open in London in the next few months plus, as mentioned above a new product release: eZ Platform Cloud, a new cloud hosting solution providing eZ Platform as a Platform as a Service (PaaS).

eZ Conference remains an event with the goal of bringing the eZ community together to match faces to names and learn about developments in eZ’s software, all while enjoying a great venue location and plenty of networking. For more tweets from eZ Conference 2017 search #ezconf2017, view pictures on Facebook and check out presentation slides from some of our speakers.

We’re grateful for all who attended this year and for those who couldn’t, we hope to see you next time. Stay tuned for a video recap plus location and date announcements for eZ Conference 2018 coming soon!

eZ Conference Day

Morten Ingebrigtsen, new eZ’s CEO initiated the conference in the morning with a keynote. He shared updates on where eZ stands today and where it will be heading tomorrow. We also heard about eZ strategy and vision, as well as the product roadmap for the rest of 2018 and beyond.

Announcements: eZ Commerce

eZ Conference was also a good time for the release of eZ Commerce, our new e-Commerce solution built on top of eZ Platform. eZ Commerce is a solution that transforms eZ Platform Enterprise Edition into a full-featured platform to meet your e-Commerce and content management needs. Thanks to eZ Commerce, you can now build websites with eZ Platform that combine very rich and complex content with integrated commerce capabilities.

DigiNight

eZ conference came to conclusion with Diginight, a digital theme party held on a cruise boat over the Rhine and organized in partnership with t3n, the leading German digital magazine.

eZ and t3n were excited to invite digital professionals from all over Europe to attend DigiNight Cologne. An evening of learning, networking and professional growth with two keynote sessions and one discussion panel, all focusing on CX and content technology. All DigiNight Cologne attendees were invited to stay for dinner and an open bar after-party.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="fr"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">An amazing <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/eZconf2018?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#eZconf2018</a> in Cologne is over!<br>Thanks to all that participated, and all our sponsors! <br>Next year we celebrate eZ Systems 20th anniversary! Where would you like us to host <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/eZconf2019?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#eZconf2019</a>? Any suggestions from the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/eZcommunity?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#eZcommunity</a>? <a href="https://t.co/yN7dGHxMpM">pic.twitter.com/yN7dGHxMpM</a></p>&mdash; eZ Systems Nordics (@eZnordics) <a href="https://twitter.com/eZnordics/status/1004650541316694016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">7 juin 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Partner Meeting

June 7, in the morning we held a Partner meeting where eZ partners heard about the latest developments in partner relations.

eZ Conference remains an event with the goal of bringing the eZ community together to match faces to names and learn about developments in eZ’s software, all while enjoying a great venue location and plenty of networking. For more tweets from eZ Conference 2018 search #ezconf2018, view pictures on Facebook and check out presentation slides from some of our speakers.

We’re grateful for all who attended this year and for those who couldn’t, we hope to see you next time. Stay tuned for a video recap plus location and date announcements for eZ Conference 2019 coming soon!

News

eZ Conference recap

Last week we held our annual event, eZ Conference. We had a record number of visitors, from Community members and developers to partners. A great time to meet, share and have fun at an excellent location - next to the Rhine River in Cologne, Germany. Congratulations to all eZ Award Winners!

Check out our photo album on Facebook to get an impression of the conference. Some of our partners also wrote a recap, look for them in the ‘other news’ section below.

"With this technology stack, we are sure we're following the best modern app development trends enabling us and our community, partners, and customers to build superb features without being hindered by the lack of experts in a given technology."

Read his full article which includes some practical examples and code, and learn how to extend eZ Platform v2 on the front end side.

Resources

The Open Source Way

We recently updated our Open Source page on our corporate website, listing all resources for our developer community. Are you new to our Community? Make sure to check out that page and learn everything about available resources and how to contribute to eZ Platform.

Question of the Week

Hubert Fongarnand asked how to implement an infinite ajax scroll pagination of a list of content. If you are interested in this solution, read the replies on our forum which also include code examples available on GitHub.

At the age of customer centricity and when it’s becoming crucial to insure a streamlined user experience all along the customer journey, many enterprise and organizations are struggling with different technologies to get their content management and e-commerce needs addressed. It has become’s very clear that it iU’s more important than ever to be able to rely on a single technology platform to build your digital experiences from engaging with potential users discovering your product and services to managing a delightful buying experience, and beyond. The solution allows organizations will be able to increase engagement and deliver a more personalized customer experience. As result, allowing a business to accelerate their sales cycle. With eZ Commerce, you can easily spark customers interest in products and drive them to complete a transaction from anywhere on the website. Now that we know what eZ Commerce has to offer and the value itlue that this solution brings to the market, it is time to dive a little deeper into the features that make this solution powerful and simple to use.

Why you might benefit from eZ Commerce?

At the age of customer centricity and when it’s now crucial to ensure a streamlined user experience along the customer journey, many organizations are struggling with different technologies to get both their content management and e-commerce needs addressed. It is more important than ever to rely on a single technology platform to build your digital experiences—from engaging with potential users discovering your products and services to managing a delightful buying experience, and beyond. With the unified technology that eZ Commerce and eZ Platform offer, organizations can optimize how they build the customer experience from when they first engage with the customer to when a product or service is purchased and delivered. As a result, organizations increase engagement, deliver more personalized experiences and accelerate their sales. Let’s dive deeper into the features that make this solution powerful but simple to use.

Top eZ Commerce Features

Unified site management

One of eZ Commerce’s biggest strengths is that it is one single platform for both editorial content management and e-Commerce operations. No longer will you need to work with two different systems that do not integrate properly. This benefits the developer building your solution as much as the marketer and editor managing both the content and commerce parts of the buyer’s journey.

Content rich product pages:

With eZ Commerce you can leverage eZ Platform’s Page Builder capabilities and embed various types of content to your pages. For example, you can embed into your product pages different blog posts, articles, documents, videos and images. This allows you to keep your consumer engaged and on your website for an extended time period.

eZ Commerce dashboard:

Another cool capability that your marketers and editors will fall in love with is the eZ Commerce dashboard. It allows your team to track, analyze and assess sales performance for your bestsellers, last ordered products, top customers and pending orders. Marketers will be able to identify top selling products and craft a promotion strategy to continue to drive sales.

Frictionless checkout process

The top worry that most e-commerce businesses have is the gruesome journey a customer needs to take before he completes an order. Our goal was to create a frictionless checkout process. We want your consumer to have a fast and smooth checkout process from anywhere on your site. The fast checkout process reduces cart abandonment and allows you to focus on creating campaigns that promote your products.

Drag and drop product comparison

A trait that is valuable to generally every consumer is the ability to compare products. With the drag and drop product comparison feature you will be able to keep your customers on your website when they want to compare products, rather than going to outside sources. This feature is simple to use and allows your consumers to add products to the comparison list on a click of a button. They can then compare products side by side by just dragging and dropping them.

Unified search

Customers will be able to take advantage of our fast and easy-to-use search engine feature for both their editorial and e-Commerce sections of the website. In an instant, shoppers will be able to quickly find products, articles, documents, images and other media. This feature can also auto-suggest search results.

Personalized Customer Experience

Organizations will enjoy our personalization and recommendation capabilities brought by eZ Personalization, which can help generate more sales. This feature allows your business to deliver relevant and personalized content based on customer preferences and behaviors. Businesses can seamlessly provide targeted promotions that fit customers’ needs. eZ Personalization is an additional cloud service that we offer on top of eZ Commerce and eZ Platform.

How will eZ Commerce benefit different stakeholders in your organization?

eZ commerce provides value for different stakeholders in an organization. CTOs and CIOs will be happy to hear that they can drastically lower operational costs as they will have one application that covers both content and commerce. Additionally, the application’s performance will be faster since eZ Commerce is built on the Symfony full-stack framework.

Finally, marketers and editors will enjoy customizing and personalize content pages by dragging and dropping banners, blog post images and other types of content from one single tool. As a result, organizations will be able to increase engagement, boost their sales and build a loyal customer base.

Engineered by experienced e-Commerce and eZ Platform experts

eZ Commerce is engineered by silver.solutions for eZ Systems. silver.solutions is a software company and service provider who focuses on facilitating B2B e-Commerce for companies in technology-oriented industries worldwide. silver.solutions offers profound business process knowledge, a strong analytical approach and more than 18 years of experience in building e-Commerce solutions on top of eZ Systems technology. One of silver.solutions' core competencies is the integration of ERP, CRM and PIM systems with e-Commerce solutions to ensure a seamless user experience. If you are interested in scheduling a demo with one of our sales representatives, please fill out the form on this page.

If you have comments, questions concerning eZ Commerce, be sure to leave a note in the comments section below.

Why you might benefit from eZ Commerce?

At the age of customer centricity and when it’s now crucial to ensure a streamlined user experience along the customer journey, many organizations are struggling with different technologies to get both their content management and e-commerce needs addressed. It is more important than ever to rely on a single technology platform to build your digital experiences—from engaging with potential users discovering your products and services to managing a delightful buying experience, and beyond. With the unified technology that eZ Commerce and eZ Platform offer, organizations can optimize how they build the customer experience from when they first engage with the customer to when a product or service is purchased and delivered. As a result, organizations increase engagement, deliver more personalized experiences and accelerate their sales. Let’s dive deeper into the features that make this solution powerful but simple to use.

Top eZ Commerce Features

Unified site management

One of eZ Commerce’s biggest strengths is that it is one single platform for both editorial content management and e-Commerce operations. No longer will you need to work with two different systems that do not integrate properly. This benefits the developer building your solution as much as the marketer and editor managing both the content and commerce parts of the buyer’s journey.

Content rich product pages:

With eZ Commerce you can leverage eZ Platform’s Page Builder capabilities and embed various types of content to your pages. For example, you can embed into your product pages different blog posts, articles, documents, videos and images. This allows you to keep your consumer engaged and on your website for an extended time period.

eZ Commerce dashboard:

Another cool capability that your marketers and editors will fall in love with is the eZ Commerce dashboard. It allows your team to track, analyze and assess sales performance for your bestsellers, last ordered products, top customers and pending orders. Marketers will be able to identify top selling products and craft a promotion strategy to continue to drive sales.

Frictionless checkout process

The top worry that most e-commerce businesses have is the gruesome journey a customer needs to take before he completes an order. Our goal was to create a frictionless checkout process. We want your consumer to have a fast and smooth checkout process from anywhere on your site. The fast checkout process reduces cart abandonment and allows you to focus on creating campaigns that promote your products.

Drag and drop product comparison

A trait that is valuable to generally every consumer is the ability to compare products. With the drag and drop product comparison feature you will be able to keep your customers on your website when they want to compare products, rather than going to outside sources. This feature is simple to use and allows your consumers to add products to the comparison list on a click of a button. They can then compare products side by side by just dragging and dropping them.

Unified search

Customers will be able to take advantage of our fast and easy-to-use search engine feature for both their editorial and e-Commerce sections of the website. In an instant, shoppers will be able to quickly find products, articles, documents, images and other media. This feature can also auto-suggest search results.

Personalized Customer Experience

Organizations will enjoy our personalization and recommendation capabilities brought by eZ Personalization, which can help generate more sales. This feature allows your business to deliver relevant and personalized content based on customer preferences and behaviors. Businesses can seamlessly provide targeted promotions that fit customers’ needs. eZ Personalization is an additional cloud service that we offer on top of eZ Commerce and eZ Platform.

How will eZ Commerce benefit different stakeholders in your organization?

eZ commerce provides value for different stakeholders in an organization. CTOs and CIOs will be happy to hear that they can drastically lower operational costs as they will have one application that covers both content and commerce. Additionally, the application’s performance will be faster since eZ Commerce is built on the Symfony full-stack framework.

Finally, marketers and editors will enjoy customizing and personalize content pages by dragging and dropping banners, blog post images and other types of content from one single tool. As a result, organizations will be able to increase engagement, boost their sales and build a loyal customer base.

Engineered by experienced e-Commerce and eZ Platform experts

eZ Commerce is engineered by silver.solutions for eZ Systems. silver.solutions is a software company and service provider who focuses on facilitating B2B e-Commerce for companies in technology-oriented industries worldwide. silver.solutions offers profound business process knowledge, a strong analytical approach and more than 18 years of experience in building e-Commerce solutions on top of eZ Systems technology. One of silver.solutions' core competencies is the integration of ERP, CRM and PIM systems with e-Commerce solutions to ensure a seamless user experience. If you are interested in scheduling a demo with one of our sales representatives, please fill out the form on this page.

If you have comments, questions concerning eZ Commerce, be sure to leave a note in the comments section below.

News

2018 eZ Awards finalists

Thank you to all who voted for this year’s eZ Awards, and congratulations to those that made it to the finals. As Global Marketing Manager Lia Pinto writes: "It’s great to see so many great projects happening in the eZ community." Winners will be announced at the eZ Awards ceremony on June 6 in Cologne, Germany during eZ Conference 2018.

eZ Platform v2.1.1 released

eZ Platform v2.1.1 has been release this week. Have a look on GitHub for the release notes. This release includes many improvements and bug fixes for ezpublish-kernel, repository-forms, ezplatform-admin-ui repositories, and more.

Pulley becomes famous, again

Pulley, our mascot, became famous last year by getting listed in the Bézier book. And he isn’t stopping there. He made it to the ‘Drawn - Leaders in contemporary illustration’ book. Well done to our Graphics Artist, Hakan Ertan!

Symfony 3.4.10 released

eZ Platform is running on the Symfony 3 full stack. This week Symfony 3.4.10 is potentially solving some issues you might have experienced in using eZ Platform. Note: at the time of publishing, Symfony 3.4.11 has been released.

Had issues publishing content with eZ Platform v2 lately?

It was caused by regression in Symfony Cache Component in 3.4.9 where optimization to cache was added. Fix for that and many other things out now so do a "composer update symfony/*" to pull in the changes. #ezplatformhttps://t.co/VodRniHEsN

The problems we had to solve

eZ Platform version 1 offered not only a way for editors to manage and create their pages in a visual way using the Page mode, but also to assemble blocks and content, take control of their landing pages and more. All this was great on paper, and worked OK for some projects but being honest, customer feedback has shown us that the Landing Page Manager was somehow falling short of what some users need and expect.

First, the editorial experience could be severely degraded because of performance flaws, mostly due to the technical U.I. framework we used. I hate to say it but we were unable to deliver the speed that a modern user expects.

Second, and also related to the underlying technology, the Landing Page Manager was extremely tedious and difficult to work with for developers when it came to customizing or extending it.

Both issues have long been identified, and with eZ Platform version 2 we laid the foundation for a new U.I. architecture that could solve this (read here to know more). This required quite a bit of rewrite and we had to phase out the work by migrating the Landing Page Manager rewrite into 2.1 and 2.2.

Lastly, aside from the flaws mentioned above, the Landing Page Manager was a relatively new tool and we learned a lot from partners and users on how to improve it. So with this major overhaul we decided, beyond solving the initial problems, to make significant changes on how it works—gathered from customer feedback.

So let’s have a look into what’s coming out of this rewrite:

The Page Builder, a new name for a major upgrade

First, let’s start with the name. This new version comes with a new name: RIP “Landing Page Manager,” welcome “Page Builder.” The new name allows us to clarify: we are not only allowing to build landing pages, but we are allowing to build any page with eZ Platform. “Landing” was misleading. And then, more than managing it really is about building pages, assembling content, creating. So welcome Page Builder!

Built for speed

Forget about the slow loading of the old Landing Page Manager, as well as its slow reloading when jumping from Content to Page mode. Thanks to the new architecture, there is no more need for such a long preloading that was especially annoying for 2.0 and 2.1 users who already had been benefiting from a fast system on other parts of the application.

Then, once loaded, the new Page Builder takes care of making every interaction significantly faster, with no latency and always keeping the user updated with what’s happening in the system.

Speed is one of those things you never get enough of. We’ll continue to try to improve speed further BUT with that significant boost, users will get enough to impact their productivity and to switch from a painful to a pleasant experience.

Editorial comfort and usability

Besides speed, the new Page Builder comes with better usability and comfort in general. It follows the new eZ user interface guidelines introduced with eZ Platform version 2, which bring more consistency and make the usage of the tool more intuitive.

Some other usability gains are delivered at different places, such as having the ability to create content “on the fly” when adding a block to a page, removing the tedious requirement of having to prepare your content beforehand in the repository. This will typically save many clicks, remove frustration, and speed up the operation of content editors. Other improvements of the same sort will be present, such as better managing versions, translations and draft conflicts.

Translation Management in Page Builder (prototype)

More power

The new Page Builder will not only be faster to use, but it will open many possibilities in the future because it is designed in a very different way. First of all, it better embraces the underlying content model of eZ Platform. With the new Page Builder, site developers will be able to create different “Page” content types. It will be as simple as adding the Page field type to any content type. From there the content type will behave like a page and will be manageable from the Page Builder

The big benefit of this is that it will give freedom to site architects and developers to define different content types with different field definitions that fit their needs. And all the fields will be one click away for the editor in Page mode—both in View and Edit.

Content type field definitions in Page Builder (prototype)

This can be used for different purposes. For instance, on some pages information architects might want to give access to SEO data with some dedicated fields for that (potentially using Nova SEO Bundle). On other pages though, architects might not want to give any editorial control over this and not have this field definition in the content type. Or, in multisite setups developers might simply want different field definitions for pages on different sites.

Beyond this, the underlying data structure of the page field type has been redefined too. It is now much more structured. This will allow us to better provide features dealing with blocks in the future, such as:

Ability to remotely access a block and its content via REST endpoint

Ability to have knowledge and control of which content is on which block, as it could be done using content relations. For instance, to warn users when deleting a content that it is used on other pages

Ability to remotely push content into a block, without the editor having to edit the page

Ability to reuse blocks

..

A much better developer experience

I won’t go into much details here as we’ll post more about this later on. We collected valuable feedback from developers using the Landing Page Manager in version 1. We learned about what is needed in terms of customization and extensibility for developers, and we tried to bring many of these lessons learned into Page Builder v2, hopefully to improve developer’s daily tasks. The main point about those improvements is that we better stick to the Symfony framework, and like for the rest of version 2, it will be possible to extend the Page Builder using the power and simplicity of Symfony Forms and TWIG template system. JavaScript knowledge won’t even be required! Stay tune for more on this soon.

Please be aware - we saved some features for later!

You should also know that we won’t ship all features of the Landing Page Manager v1 into this first iteration of the Page Builder coming with version 2.2. The reason for this is simple, this was a major overhaul and we decided to focus on building something solid and powerful rather than rushing and carrying debts or design flaws. We prioritized the most used features, and we’ll finish the migration of the few missing features with the improvements that were necessary in the next fast track release.

There are two specific features that won’t be provided in the Page Builder v2.2: the Schedule Block and the Form Builder.

So if you’re looking to using either the Schedule Block or the Form Builder and looking to upgrade, it is likely that you’ll have to wait for our next release in September, but please reach out to our customer success team to discuss the topic.

For now, we are working hard to finish this version 2.2 and look forward to this release, which is scheduled for a little over a month from now. If you are interested or have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below, on discuss.ezplatform.com or productmanagement@ez.no.

Finally, two of our lead developers working on the Page Builder will be speaking at the eZ Conference on June 6 in Cologne. It’s a great one-day event packed with knowledge (this year tickets are free!). Don’t miss this opportunity to learn and discuss with our product and engineering teams about the Page Builder.

eZ Automated Translation is the first connector created out of the “Build with eZ” initiative we launched in March. This translation connector was a joint effort between eZ’s product team and Sébastien Morel, CTO of Novactive US. The connector is simple to use and allows end-users to translate text and characters to over 100 different languages. A useful function for customers who have multilingual and multi-site configurations in their projects. Let’s take a deeper look into the capabilities of this connector.

The eZ Automated Translation connector has three core capabilities/benefits:

Editors can translate content “on the fly” and further edit as part of the workflow.

Administrators can setup different translation services to use (Google Translate, DeepL (beta), etc.).

Developers can develop new drivers for additional translation services.

The connector is simple to use and, in many ways, similar to the regular interaction in eZ Platform when translating content manually. All the user needs to do is log in to eZ Platform and choose the content item to translate. The user will go to the "Translation" tab, click on the “add translation” button, choose the language she wants to translate from, and then select the language she wants to automatically translate to.

￼The system will then automatically translate the content by calling the configured translation service, while maintaining the structure and style of the original content piece. The user can then go ahead and publish the content item ￼and view it live on her website.

Below is an illustration for how to use the eZ Automated Translation connector.

Automatic translation services have made huge progress in the last years and have become a viable option for many cases. We believe editors will truly appreciate this feature, as it allows them to easily and quickly translate content. All they have to do afterwards is review, refine and improve the translated content as needed.

We have no doubt this tool will allow teams to be more efficient and save time as they deal with multilingual content. Plus, the eZ Automated Translation connector is not limited to Google Translate and DeepL only, it can be extended to include additional translation services. There are several options on the market that can be easily integrated to our connector with APIs.

If you have comments, questions or suggestions on our Automated Translation connector, be sure to leave a note in the comments section below or on our discussion forum at discuss.ezplatform.com.

News

Improving eZ Platform User Experience

Last week Inaki Juaniz-Velilla (UI/UX Developer at eZ) and André Rømcke (VP Technical Services & Support) both wrote about eZ Platform user experience improvements for editorial teams. These improvements can be found in the latest release 1.13.2. Read both of their blog posts to learn more on how we work with enterprise customers, and what these improvements include.

“The Online Editor is possibly one of the most important features in eZ Platform, when it comes to editorial experience. That is why we wanted to share regarding this specific change, and also gather wider feedback on the other changes proposed above. We would like to gather feedback related to these improvements to the editorial experience of eZ Platform users. We invite and welcome all of your comments and ideas.”

Getting the Permissions for the Admin Panel Right

Product managers and engineers at eZ are in the process of properly handling permissions in eZ Platform U.I. rolling out improvements to the next releases (2.2, 2.3, 2.4), with the goal of having a large and strong coverage by the LTS in December.

Help us get the permissions right and leave your vote. We have setup a poll on our forum with suggested solutions.

Connector Competition Continuous

The Connector Competition which started in April will continue all through May. You can still join and have a chance to win $ 2,500. The winner of this round will be announced at the eZ Conference on June 6 in Cologne.

Resources

Edgar EzUIFaviconBundle

As part of is ‘One Monday One Bundle’ effort, Emmanuel Drouet has released another bundle. Called EzUIFaviconBundle, this bundle lets you generate favicons for your site accesses within eZ Platform. You can watch a demo on YouTube and find the source on Packagist.

Social Media

I think one of our biggest #ezplatform bundle is almost finished! Hope it'll be ready for the #ezconf2018 to demo it to you at our booth! (hint: it's a newer, better, fancier, completely revamped version of a well-known community legacy extension) #staytuned#ezcommunity ;-)

A story of how we work with Enterprise customers

For some background on these improvements, it’s worth mentioning how we are aiming to work with our Enterprise customers, though this is not unique to this improvement, we do this across a lot of the changes you see—including in our latest release.

Across our organization, especially in the customer-facing areas, we are focused in learning how our customers use and experience our software. This in turn informs the relevant area of our organization, which helps us better discover, design and prioritize future changes to our product. We do this because our success in the long run is directly dependent on our customers’ success with our software.

This particular change is a good example of that. The customer who provided feedback to us is in the News industry, has a large editorial team spread across the world, and they typically spend extensive time working on content in the CMS. They are a key customer within one of the markets we especially care for and optimize eZ Platform for.

Their feedback was quite simple: The Paragraph toolbar is inhibiting basic editorial tasks and hence was annoying the team.

They also asked if the toolbar could behave more like a standard Alloy.

Some background on the Online Editor, and it’s usage of Alloy

At this point, it is worth diving into the background of the Online Editor, our RichText Editor. It is based on Alloy Editor, which in turn is based on CKEditor.

Back when we decided to use Alloy, we noticed that we needed more advanced block handling than what it offered. We knew we needed capabilities such as moving blocks up and down, removing them altogether, controlling their alignment, or switching between header levels and between image sizes. And back then there were indications from the Alloy team (Liferay) that the changes we intended to do were perhaps not the direction they wanted for the project itself, ruling out contribution (for now).

This is how the custom toolbar handling for blocks was born. And in our initial user testing, it fared quite well.

User testing is something you ideally never stop doing

Almost in parallel to the issue our customer reported in regards to the toolbar, our Product Management team had already been running a series of user testing sessions and this issue was also turning up. The major pain point detected showed users clicking above the paragraph they were working on to move the toolbar up to be able to read the content just written (a very usual task when editing or creating content).

View of user testing flow for a long editorial workflow (~45 minutes), showing all interactions performed so far. Within the blue circle, all main editorial interactions. Within the red circle, extra interactions for avoiding the Paragraph toolbar.

A common use case showed a user clicking an average of 25 times for a long editing workflow, about 45 minutes. Users' tricks to avoid the Online Editor toolbar? Clicking on two paragraphs above; clicking one paragraph below; or clicking outside of the Input Rich Text box, as seen on the clicks on the right toolbar.

Another interesting finding related to this paragraph toolbar pointed out that alignment buttons are barely used when performing common editorial tasks. In addition, we also detected the need for improvements in other toolbars that are part of the Online Editor.

So when the customer request came through, we were ready to work together with them. We already had the background knowledge plus a good hunch of what was the customer’s real issue.

Changes available as of last week v1.13.2 release

To address our customer’s feedback we decided to split the efforts into two scopes—one short-term for v1.13, and one mid-term for v2.

For v1.13, we sought out a few different approaches:

Introduce larger margins between blocks and slim down the toolbar to fit within those margins

Hide the toolbar while typing

However, after iterating with our customer’s team and testing them, both of these approaches proved to be clunky or janky. So in the end, we looked into attaching the toolbar to the top of the editor, which proved we needed to handle cases where the top of the editor is not visible within current browser view.

The final resolution, which the customer was satisfied with, is the following:

Thoughts on where to take this in the future for v2

When we decided to improve our Online Editor experience from eZ Publish Platform to eZ Platform v1, we wanted a solution to write rich editorial content with ease, efficiency and comfort via a refined and simplified Online Editor. Our main objectives were:

Contextual toolbars - with customized UI clearly and explicitly showing users which actions are the only ones available for a specific element in a given context

Styling at all levels - via a UI that helps the user apply style changes to inline content, as well as to the block level element, like paragraphs. As a result, the UI is optimized for every element (a heading, a paragraph, an image, etc.)

Distraction-free editing - we’re giving users the ability to edit Body content on its own interaction layer so the users are narrowly focused on their edits, rather than being distracted by other fields and buttons. Unnecessary buttons and functions are removed while only the most essential remain

Extensibility point - all these feature improvements came, as usual, with the requirement that developers and partners can simply add new elements or remove them as needed

Editorial UX is a key driver in the choice of a CMS. That’s why ease-of-use and speed are our main focus for the upcoming improvements in this fall’s Fast Track release, including for the Online Editor.

The feature improvements in the upcoming Fast Track releases rely on placing content at the center of the editorial experience. This is one of the most important aspects we have learned from our exchange with this specific customer in the News industry but also with customers in other domains—and it’s something we truly agree on.

Among the things we consider for v2 improvements:

Moving actions in the toolbar within the editor to an interaction bar on the right, clearing out the editing view

Toolbars are lighter and cleaner, using less space

Top and bottom view of content is cleared, prioritizing common editorial tasks

Prototype - Text highlighted and displaying hyperlink toolbar with internal link selected and open in the same tab option selected (Work in progress)

Call for feedback

The Online Editor is possibly one of the most important features in eZ Platform, when it comes to editorial experience. That is why we wanted to share regarding this specific change, and also gather wider feedback on the other changes proposed above.

We would like to gather feedback related to these improvements to the editorial experience of eZ Platform users. We invite and welcome all of your comments and ideas, please feel free to comment below or send them out to productmanagement@ez.no.

Building new websites incrementally

In 2014, Espace Courbe chose to build the Museum Routes site on eZ Publish because content is such a critical component for The Museums of Quebec. Espace Courbe chose eZ Publish for its strength with structured content, multilingual sites, and protected access. “The site will be there for 15 years, so it needs to be strong and last for a long time,” says Patrick Turmel, developer with Espace Courbe.

Over the course of the next three years, Espace Courbe rebuilt the remaining sites on the same eZ Publish / eZ Platform instance. Rather than having to keep multiple environments in sync during redevelopment, writing risky all-at-once migration scripts, having a big training exercise, and gettings editors to do double content entry for a period of time, Espace Courbe instead chose a strategy of steady evolution. Structural changes and new features were developed and applied iteratively, so that by the time they were ready to launch the new site designs, the new site structure had already been applied on the back-end.

Notable site features

In addition to modernizing the sites using a fluid development approach, Espace Courbe developed some unique features for The Museums of Quebec.

Randomized search

Most search engines will display results lists in a prescribed order such as alphabetically or based on specific criteria. Espace Courbe, however, wanted to ensure that all museums, even those that aren’t at the top of the alphabet, got top billing in search results. So it randomized search results for every session. “You won’t see the same museum at the top of the list twice,” says Turmel.

To that it added another useful feature: the ability to return to the same spot in a search results list after clicking through to a specific result. “If you’ve scrolled through five pages of search results, you don’t want to go back to page 1 when you click out of a specific result.”

Finally, Espace Courbe was able to include content in search results asymmetrically. For example, museums from the Museum Guide will show up in search results on the Professional site, but results from the Professional site will not show up in the Museum Guide.

Geolocation

Espace Courbe also built a geolocation feature that can be used on-demand on the search page. So when a visitor wants to find a museum and sorts the results by distance, the site will prompt them for permission, and then (if they grant permission), will provide a list of museums sorted by distance. It will also outline the accuracy of the geolocation reading.

For example, if the visitor is on a wifi network or has a GPS chip, the accuracy should be good. If the accuracy of the geolocation reading is low, the site will still display the list but warn the user that the sort is inaccurate. This feature is mostly useful for people using the search functionality on a mobile device; wherever they are, they can get a list of museums sorted by distance and then get an idea of those that are closest to them.

User generated content

Finally, the site for museum professionals now allows members of the public to submit content such as job postings, promotions, departures, and so on. Espace Courbe built a content submission page that allows supporting documents to be uploaded. On the back-end, an approval workflow is activated when a user submits a draft of their posting, which goes to an editor who can review it before publishing.

The Museums of Quebec’s sites are now more visual, easier to maintain, and more interactive for users. And with eZ Publish / eZ Platform at their core, they will last for decades to come.

News

How to be GDPR Compliant with eZ Platform or eZ Publish

"GDPR is just around the corner and many eZ Platform and eZ Publish users are likely asking how they can comply with this complex legislation. The good news is that you can start by implementing different features already available on the eZ Platform and eZ Publish frameworks."

Join Us at eZ Conference 2018

Join us at eZ Conference 2018 in Cologne, June 5-6, and be sure to plan to stick around for the after-party happening onboard the Pure Liner boat. More information and free tickets here: https://conference.ez.no/

Nominations for eZ Awards 2018

Just a few days left to submit your nominations for the eZ Awards 2018. Nominations will close on May 1, submit your vote if you have not done so yet!

Question of the Week

Tore Minsaas asked on our forum: Is there a list somewhere of the cookies that a standard eZ Platform installation uses? Sylvain Guittard from the Product team replied, check out the forum topic, GDPR: eZ Platform standard cookie list.

What is GDPR?

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new regulation on data protection and data privacy for all European Union (EU) citizens. The regulation is set to go into effect on May 25, 2018. GDPR’s goal is to strengthen data privacy by securing EU citizens' rights to be forgotten or their right to inquire about personal data that is collected on their behalf by different entities that they come in contact with. GDPR requires that data controllers and data processors implement certain measures to meet new data protection requirements.

Data Controller vs Data Processor

A data controller is any entity that decides the purpose and means of personal data processing . On the other hand, a data processor is the entity that is responsible for processing the data on behalf of the controller. It is necessary to understand the distinction between these two roles. Gdpreu.org uses the following example to distinguish between the two roles: “Acme Co. sells widgets to consumers and uses Email Automation Co. to email consumers on their behalf and track their engagement activity, then with regard to such email activity data, Acme Co. is the data controller, and Email Automation Co. is the data processor.” According to GDPR the data controller is the principal party responsible for collecting consents, managing the revoking of consents and the deletion of personal data. The data processor implements these actions on behalf of the controller’s request.

What Are the Ramifications of Breaching GDPR?

The law states that any entity that collects personal data of EU citizens will be responsible and accountable for how that data is handled. According to Article 4 of the GDPR, ‘personal data’ means “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.”

A breach of the GDPR regulation can cause a company to be fined up to €20 million or 4% of its worldwide annual revenue (the biggest being applied).

Now that we have provided some context for those who are not familiar with GDPR, let’s look at how to comply.

How to Address GDPR with eZ Platform

GDPR is a complex legislation that for many is still difficult to understand and prepare for. Since the legislation is often vague, it is difficult to understand how it will be enforced starting May 25th. Although we are not experts on the matter, we have done great amounts of research on this topic. Here we share with you some guidance on how to implement the right features on your eZ Platform or eZ Publish website to ensure you comply with these upcoming policies. This past week I interviewed our rockstar Technical Product Manager, Bertrand Dunogier about steps eZ clients who use eZ Platform can take to address the GDPR predicament.

Question: What is the first step organizations should consider when preparing for GDPR?

BD: The first steps are actually not about technology or about eZ Platform at all. Organizations need to first take a good look at themselves and begin to understand and document what data they are collecting and how it is being stored. Companies must ask themselves the following questions:

What type of data are we collecting?

How relevant is the data we have collected?

Are we communicating to our users/visitors the type of data we are collecting?

Did we ask visitors for permission to collect data?

What is our consent management process?

What is the purpose of the data we have collected?

How will this data be utilized?

One of the best measures companies can take is to eliminate old and irrelevant data. We need to understand that 95% of data collected holds no relevance. Therefore, the best thing a company can do is to get rid of irrelevant data. The second measure companies can take is to begin documenting all personal data that is collected and its purpose as well as the processes on how it is collected.

Question: How can you ask for consent with eZ Platform?

The places where personal data is collected using eZ Platform or eZ Publish are user profile creation, forms using user generated content (UGC) in eZ content repository and forms independent of the content repository using our form builder, some forms developed custom by the developer of the site or even a third-party solution or library. Let’s first define how personal data is collected using these different instances.

User Profile Creation

A person creating a user profile on eZ Platform or eZ Publish. Depending on the projects, you might have pre-defined personal fields that users must fill out such as email and their first and last names.

UGC Form

On a UGC form a user creates content in the repository. For example, posting a review or listing a product for sale on a community based e-Commerce site.

Independent Form

Example of form builder in eZ Platform or eZ Survey extension in eZ Publish. In all three of these scenarios you can (and should) implement a consent management solution that will allow your organization to comply with GDPR regulations. We recommend that you add a new field description that is mandatory. For new registrants who create user profiles, we suggest that you implement an email field. Requiring users to provide you with an email will allow you, as the controller, to send a follow-up email to users that details the type of information you are collecting on them and the purpose of collecting that data. Secondly, a follow-up email will allow you to authenticate the user. This allows you to create a double opt-mechanism.

Another solution that can address all three scenarios is the addition of a checkbox field. The checkbox field will require users to check the consent box prior to registration. This will provide you with proof that the user has provided you with his consent/permission to gather data on them. The checkbox should also be used to confirm in a UGC scenario that the user has agreed to use the license and contribute content on the platform.

Additionally, make sure to be explicit about the purpose for which you collect data in your consent request and not to conceal what type of information you will be collecting on your user.￼￼

Question: What can be done if a user requests to be deleted?

BD: A registered user can ask for his account and personal data to be deleted. Deleting the account and the personal data (user fields) stored within the user profile is not a problem. However, in the case of UGC, it can be tricky. If the contributions from the user are personal data (and in many case they will be), erasing them is, of course, possible but this could lead to undesired broken links and loss of content on the website for other users—and you should be aware of this.

If the contributions are not to be handled as personal data (maybe the user signed an agreement granting specific rights to this content), then deleting the user account might lead to broken links and orphan content. In this case, we recommend to disable the user account and anonymize all its fields by replacing them with dummy values, which lead to the same result without deleting the account itself.

To erase personal data, site administrators can simply use the Administration Interface by going to the User Management section to delete or disable a user as well as doing a filtered search to identify all content related to a specific user/author. And of course all of this can also be done by using lower level APIs.

Question: How can you use eZ Platform to export data?

BD: Currently we do not have an exporting button. However, we are looking to develop an out-of-the-box capability that allows users to “retrieve data” in the click of a button. This button will allow you to download and export personal data. Currently developers can customize the system using the API. The API allows you to query the content repository for all content published by an author, and can then be exported. We are also considering creating a simple “forget me” button that once pressed, will lead to all the personal data collected on a certain user to be deleted automatically.

Conclusion

GDPR can be a very confusing piece of legislation. The good news is that a lot can be done about it with on eZ Platform and eZ Publish, thanks to APIs and architecture. The final word on what needs to be done to comply will depends a lot on your specific installation and how you use the platform. It will require you to adjust how you address data collection and data privacy.

In the near future we hope to introduce some features that will go beyond the current capabilities for reaching GDPR compliance, making it easier and faster to implement. For example, we are looking into various features such as a consent management panel, a data export panel and a consent withdrawal tool bar.

And stay tuned, we’ll post more about GDPR here as well. In the meantime, you can provide any comments or questions about how eZ Platform or eZ Publish can help you be GDPR compliant in the comment section below or our discussion forum at discuss.ezplatform.com.

Q: What was the driving decision behind going with the HTTP Request/Response model instead of the more common MVC architecture when Symfony was invented?

A: The request/response model is the basic foundation for all web frameworks, it allows you to work with the pattern that best fits your application. Symfony Full-Stack out of the box actually uses a form of MVC. But it is also flexible enough to work with other patterns you might want to implement. So it is actually not a question of a specific model, but of being open to all kinds of use cases on the web.

Q: What are some of the challenges SensioLabs must overcome when onboarding developers with a background in different frameworks?

A: Most of the concepts that Symfony has introduced to the PHP world in version 2—things like request/response encapsulation, dependency injection, a modern framework architecture—have become mainstream now in most frameworks and in the PHP world in general. So if the developer in question has a background in another contemporary framework, the barrier of entry is actually not high.

Q: With Symfony 4, the full-stack approach is no longer in the spotlight, marking a huge change in thinking for many developers not used to microservices architectures. What is Sensio’s strategy to help these developers change how they approach and solve architectural challenges?

A: Symfony 4 changes the way components and bundles are installed, and Flex gives you the tools to only install what you need. The recommended way to configure your app is now by way of environment variables, and you are able to pre-warm the cache for deployment. All of these features will be just as beneficial for traditional full-stack applications, and making use of them (or not) does not make or break a microservice. Symfony is the full-stack framework it always was, but it's now easier to finely tune it to your needs—which might or might not include microservices. If you have a use case that does not benefit from a microservice architecture—and a good portion of small to mid-sized projects don't—then nothing changes for you. Symfony full-stack is not going away.

Q: Changing from Assetic to Webpack is another big shift for many developers. Do you see a growing need to be a full-stack polyglot to play well with Symfony in the future?

A: Assetic had gone out of use in most projects for some time already. It was removed for a variety of reasons, including performance, but most importantly, because Symfony is a PHP framework and should not make any assumptions about the frontend in a rapidly changing frontend world, where every team has different needs. Note that while Webpack Encore is published under the "Symfony" vendor name, it is not specifically tailored to the Symfony framework, nor indeed to PHP. You can perfectly use it in a Python Flask application for example. As such, Symfony does not really play into the question of whether you should be a polyglot developer or not.

Q: SensioLabs will be holding training alongside eZ’s training workshop on June 5 in Cologne, one day before eZ Conference. What can developers look forward to learning in SensioLabs’ training?

A: Developers in the workshop will get a hands-on introduction to working with the Symfony 4 framework. Starting with the project setup, we'll cover most of the everyday uses of the framework, from how routing and controllers work, to implementing a simple form and a quick introduction to the dependency injection container. Attendees should be sure to bring their own laptop with a development environment compatible with Symfony 4.

If you have not yet registered for eZ Conference on June 6 or eZ's workshop training on June 5 in Cologne, there's still time. We hope to see you there!

News

Speaker Lineup Announced for eZ Conference 2018

We've released our lineup of speakers for the Content Track and Technical Track. Thank you to all who submitted speaking proposals. Check out the individual speakers in our announcement. If you haven’t registered for eZ Conference on June 6 in Cologne, you can do so at conference.ez.no—reminder: it’s free this year.

Are you a developer? Don’t forget we’ll have a full day of workshops the day prior to the conference, on June 5. Workshop sessions will cover eZ Platform v2, eZ Platform Cloud and eZ Commerce.

SensioLabs will also hold a developer workshop in parallel to eZ’s on June 5 at the same venue as eZ Conference. It will be an introduction to Symfony, and it will get developers off the ground building a simple application where they will get to know the most important features to use in their everyday work with Symfony.

Developers can register for both the eZ and SensioLabs workshops at conference.ez.no.

Meet the New Community Board

Last week we announced the new Community Board. The Board has a term of one year, and after the renewal process we are welcoming Gunnstein Lye (eZ Systems) and Alex Wilson (Bluetel) to the Community Board.

The eZ Community Board represents you, the eZ community. You are invited to contact one or more of those who represent you, or to contact the entire Board, to share your views, needs, and questions.

eZ Platform 1.13.2-rc1

eZ Platform 1.13.2 (LTS) is available as release candidate. As always, we welcome developers to test this release. Check out the change log on GitHub, which includes the improvements and bug fixes this release will bring. This release is scheduled for end of next week.

In Other News:

Resources

eZ Platform Bundle Generator

Another "One Monday One Bundle" by Emmanuel Drouet. This time Emmanuel shares his eZ Platform bundle generator (EzBundleGeneratorBundle) on YouTube and Packagist.

Question of the Week

On our Slack channels, Kostas asked this: “Hi guys, is there a way to convert legacy XML Text to new Rich Text format?” Edi Modrić replied: "Yes, there's a `php bin/console ezxmltext:convert-to-richtext` script. Take care though, the script is still unstable and I think not all features are supported, so DB backup is mandatory before"

Social Media

I have installed #ezpublish/#ezplatform at least once every month for the last 7,8 years and I guess it's fair to say I know how to do it pretty well. but I had my best and easiest installation of lifetime with #eZlaunchpad last weekend. thanks @Plopix@eZSystems

KEYNOTE

A Roadmap to Becoming Your Customer’s Information HubLearn how companies—even the most traditional ones—can transform themselves into digitally driven organizations that focus on customer experience.

CONTENT TRACK

Lars Eirik Rønning - VP Technical Services, eZ Systems

Working with Content on eZ Platform v2Learn how to create content for a website using eZ Platform v2. You will walk away with practical knowledge of working with content on eZ Platform v2, including creating and editing various types of content, plus more.

Roland Benedetti - Chief Product Officer, eZ Systems

Personalization on eZ Platform v2Personalization does not always have to be complex. Learn about the small steps marketers and editors can take to implement personalization features that deliver a lot of value. You will learn about relevance and interest, tags and taxonomy to categorize and segment, and explicit personalization.

Ania Hentz - Co-Founder, silver.solutions

Engage Your Customers with eZ CommerceUsing eZ Commerce, learn how to combine content and commerce to drive more engagement with your website visitors. Discover how to feature best-selling or last-viewed items, learn how to use sales banners and scheduled content, plus add content for special items-all with the goal of engaging your buyers and providing a memorable customer experience.

Oliver Dirr - Head of Web Development & Social Media, Landeshauptstadt München

How We Modeled a Tourism Portal with eZ PlatformTourism sites are a little different from classic news sites. In tourism it's not so much about creating new content, but it's very much about improving and combining the existing, timeless content again and again. Learn how the official tourism portal for Munich used eZ to make their content multilingual, reusable and easy to combine. And hear about the benefits felt by their small editorial team—once content is created, it's very easy to manage.

Anne-Marie Feilberg - Director of Partnerships, Siteimprove

GDPR in the Digital WorldThe deadline for GDPR compliance is May 25, 2018. Are you an eZ Platform editor? Are you ready for GDPR? Learn how to use the Siteimprove plugin for eZ Platform to support your GDPR compliance process.

TECHNICAL TRACK

Andreas Hucks - Deutschland CTO, SensioLabs

Symfony Under the HoodAndreas will help us gain insight into the inner workings of the Symfony framework. If you have used Symfony, but have never built a compiler pass, a cache warmer, or are wondering how exactly the container is built, this talk is for you.

Frank Dege - Co-Founder, silver.solutions

How to Extend eZ CommerceeZ Commerce is eZ’s new content+commerce platform. Frank Dege, Co-founder of silver.solutions will show the flexibility of eZ Commerce and how to extend the software in projects.

Alex Wilson - Principal Developer, Bluetel Solutions

What am I? Serverless Concept MiningWith tens or hundreds of thousands of articles, how do you organize content for your editors? And how do you present it to your users? Concept mining is a technique used to categorize content, and we can use it to solve these problems as well as opening doors for the future. Using the Serverless Framework and a little natural-language processing magic we can quickly and easily annotate our content.

Sébastien Morel - CTO/Head of U.S., Novactive

eZ Platform Cloud and eZ Launchpad: Don’t Host, Don’t Deploy, Don’t Install: Just Code!Learn what’s involved in the process of launching a new web project—from starting with nothing to having a local development environment shared with your team using eZ Platform, Docker plus Platform.sh and more in just a few hours.

Extending eZ Platform v2 with Symfony and React (Presented by eZ’ Lead Developer and Technical Product Manager)eZ Platform v2 is out and the UI has been fully redeveloped using Symfony as well as libraries such as React. You'll learn to quickly and simply extend eZ Platform's UI to fit your needs and add your own features to the platform. This session will go through the major extension points in the application and how to integrate your code—be it Twig-based classic web pages or with more modern and more interactive React.js code.

Using eZ Platform in an API Era (Presented by eZ’ Lead Developer and Product Manager)The time for monolithic applications is far gone. Now developers are building solutions by assembling applications and services of all kinds and in all ways. In this session we’ll focus on how eZ Platform embraces the modern way of building applications—from interacting its content repository service via the remote API, to integrating third-party services simply within eZ.